Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger

by Goforth, Jim

  There were scores of shirts with the standard motifs and logos; Cannibal Corpse, Monstrosity, Obituary, Malevolent Creation, Dismember, Decapitated, and now, more than ever, Seth acknowledged just how portentous and ominous these particular band names loomed, especially to him and his hapless unarmed cronies. It was like a prospective list of their fates, or potentially gruesome ways in which they were each going to die.

  Myriad skulls, brutally slaughtered bodies, dripping eyeballs and entrails, demons, devils and scythe bearing Grim Reapers adorned these cheerful garments in a parade of images that would have meant nothing at all to Seth any other time, but right now they were omens of doom and forthcoming disaster.

  The guttural rumble of SamEdi cut through the commotion, the cavernous timbre of his voice bubbling over the caged crowd noise like a particularly clogged sewer finally bursting and spilling noxious waste.

  “Quieten down now!” He issued, and when the noise subsided to an extent, then begin escalating again, a roar erupted from him. “Shut the fuck up!”

  This did the trick and the agitated crowd obeyed his command dutifully. All those caged souls lapsed into expectant quiet, sure the frontman would now answer their queries, most of those which had been asked drowned out and lost in the clamour.

  “As you may or may not know, we performed down at the Park earlier on this evening, a set which unfortunately had to be cut short by circumstances. Apologies to you all for the cloak and dagger rough stuff, which resulted in you all being transported here and kept in the dark, without truly having a clue what was going on, but of course I can now reveal the truth. You’ve all been selected for a special Undead Fleshcrave performance, an intimate audience with the band, if you will. Hopefully, this will more than compensate for having to miss the show put on at the Park, but since that one was prematurely ended, trust me when I say this one is going to leave that show for dead.”

  A stream of retorts and desperate statements to refute those words came from some of the seated folks in the centre of the room, but they were largely swallowed up in the uproarious stridency of approval bursting on the heels of SamEdi’s declaration from the cell dwellers. Some still stood back from the bars, remaining in the centre of the cells or towards the back, but the vast majority crowded to the front, clamouring and begging to be let free of their enclosures.

  SamEdi, however, said nothing more. He instead glanced around at his assembled bandmates, all geared up to go, and nodded his large bald dome just once, a barely perceptible motion, and instantly lead axeman SkinCarver attacked his instrument with fervour, ripping a high-pitched, fast paced intro laden with pinch harmonics, from it. GatlingGrinder was quick to follow with a torrent of drum blasts that sounded like detonations going off in the room, then the remainder of the band were on song as well, with SamEdi, the last of them to add anything, spilling a subterranean belching invocation into his microphone.

  Seth felt his mouth go dry, his heart thump its way back up into that all too familiar terrible position, seeing that signal from SamEdi which he knew was the trigger to go ahead and start the show. However he could already tell that this track was not the hideous entity he and all his seated, unrestrained, but still fundamentally captive fellows, were dreading. This was just another one of the straight forward brutal compositions pulled from the quintet’s ensemble, with none of the horrible nausea inducing soundscapes that would be serving as precursor to the Zombie Trigger.

  Perhaps it is just a genuine concert, Seth thought ludicrously, that faint, unlikely possibility seeming about as remote as their chances of getting out of here alive. It wouldn’t matter in any case, in each concert performed thus far by the Fleshcravers, the pinnacle of their performance was the life-changing, life-shattering, zombie-creating Trigger, whether it came after multiple other normal numbers, or whether they pulled it out right at the very start of the gig.

  More likely it was a case of prolonging the terror, the horrendous inevitable. Letting the fear and tension of those who knew what was going to happen escalate to fever pitch, where they might be reduced to try something desperate and crazed, attempting some escape or possibly even to stop the band, while the unwitting caged fools headbanged and moshed in their cells.

  With all the Sentinels gone, the Renegade Masters had merely stepped in to replace them, disposable pawns, and Seth suspected the Masters were just as dispensable as the Sentinels had been.

  Death metal emanated into every corner of the room, bouncing off walls in a reverberating hammer, the noise thunderous. Though it was possibly not too much a smaller venue than the Quo Vadis Bar, it seemed to possess the sort of acoustics which grabbed hold of the giant sound welling from the band’s instruments and increased it further, making it immense. The caged crowd were loving it, though they still insistently clamoured to be free.

  As a torrent of percussion slammed through a temporary midsection where only GatlingGrinder held court, the majority of lights in the house dimmed, engulfing the place largely in darkness. Some illumination then returned, but it was primarily located over the rows and rows of cells and the audiences inside them. These lights were mostly that sickly green iridescence which dominated the gig back in Armada and now the fear began creping through Seth despite the fact that the five piece were still mid-song in the introductory composition.

  The one good thing the shifting of lights had done was cast the middle part of the room, where all their chairs were located into some semblance of darkness, cloaked momentarily in thick shadows. Whether that was supposed to be an intentional thing Seth had no real idea, but what he did know was that everything was setting the scene to switch the Trigger on.

  Urgent murmurs, questions, and pleas floated through the seated congregation.

  “What the fuck do we do?” Dax hissed, his voice one of the more prominent. “We’re fucked. They’re going to play the Trigger song, then all those idiots inside those cages are going to go full zombie and then they’re going to let them out. At which point, we are all fucked.”

  “Just stay calm,” Black advised. “Everybody, keep cool. I don’t doubt that’s the plan for sure, but all the Masters are still in here. We already know those motherfuckers are going to be overcome with that nausea and shit when the Trigger is flipped. Problem is, we don’t know where they are going to be, if they are going to clear out before that happens. My guess is, no, they won’t, they’ll stick around to make sure the band aren’t vulnerable.”

  “What if they let everybody out before the song plays?” Heather asked in a quiet voice, looking to Tempest for reassurance that he was going to do his damndest to protect her. “Then they’re right amongst us when they turn.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to do that. They need the Masters as security, without them here they know we will rush the stage. My guess is they flip the switch on the Trigger, let the infection take hold in the cages, then those doors are coming open.”

  “Maybe all simultaneously,” Seth voiced one of his concerns. “Like some automatic switch somewhere that lets them all out at once. Which probably means all the Masters have to get their asses out first. Maybe that Jazmyn bitch controls that from another room.”

  “And maybe, the Masters are expendable too. Pawns to use up like their Sentinels, and leave to die with the rest of us,” Tempest suggested.

  “Whatever the case, we need to be prepared to go for the Masters as soon as they are vulnerable. Which is when that Trigger first kicks in. Ignore what the fuck is going on in the cells, we all know they are going to turn in there. We need to get some sort of advantage. Some of us are going to die, best believe that,” Black stated grimly. “But we’re all going to die otherwise anyway. And it has to be a hell of a lot better getting taken out with a quick bullet than being ripped apart and eaten by motherfucking zombies. Tell me I’m wrong about that.”

  “Ah, this is so fucked,” Mark moaned. “This is fucking ridiculous.”

  He slammed a fist in helpless frustration down on
his own thigh, narrowly missing the hand of Miranda which was clasping it. She flinched, jumping away, looking at him in shock as if she thought he’d actually been aiming at her.

  “Yep. Too true. This is fucked,” Tempest agreed taciturnly. “But if we have to die like this, then rest assured, a pile of them are going out with us too. And our goal is still to destroy Undead Fleshcrave. That hasn’t ever changed.”

  “Are you fucking serious?” Now Dax, faced with a mountain of a challenge that was in reality insurmountable, reverted back towards the old Dax, the one who would rather run than having to contend with the astronomical odds presented here. Especially considering they were all disarmed now and as vulnerable as all fuck, about to be set upon by the caged pre-zombies. “This isn’t about that shit any more, it’s about us surviving!”

  “No, Dax, it isn’t about us surviving. It’s always been about ensuring Undead Fleshcrave are eradicated. If we die in the process, so be it.”

  CHAPTER FORTY FIVE-BLUDGEONING

  The Zombie Trigger wasn’t the next forthcoming track, but instead, one of the band’s more lauded efforts ‘Buried Beneath Bones’. That fact didn’t ease Seth’s mind any, in fact it just exacerbated things even more. Adding to that stress and tension was the rudimentary plan put in place by Black and Tempest, which was really not much of a plan in the slightest. It was all they had though. There was nothing more they could do but to hope they were ready to capitalise on the tiny window of opportunity Black proposed they would have when the Trigger was engaged.

  The noise, the energy of the caged, captive audience, and all the body heat in the room was escalating the temperature, but the sweat Seth felt trickling on him was a cold one. A chilling, terrifying one. This was where everything was going to end, and he knew that. It wouldn’t be enough for them to survive this, even if some of them made it to the temporarily incapacitated Masters when they succumbed to the sickening sound of the Trigger.

  Though all of them were on edge, surrounded by a buffeting wall of death metal sound and insane screaming and cheering, keeping their eyes fleeting anxiously around the entire vicinity trying to pick when and what things were going to occur, none of them were actually ready for it when it happened―because it happened mid-song.

  One minute the feral fivesome were dealing out chugging riffery and pounding percussions while SamEdi bellowed and growled virtually indecipherable statements, and the bass of FaceGnawer ran a thick line of rhythm underneath everything else, and then the hideous sick-making swell of earbleed inducing aural horror was engulfing them.

  It swamped the former cavalcade of brutal death metal, looming right up in the very centre of another track, literally splitting right into it without any indication, no uncomfortable shift, almost as if had been rehearsed to a fine point. Then, as that hideously familiar sound and sensation swamped Seth, thrusting invasive fingers of pain into his ears and incredibly terrible feelings of helpless sickness into his stomach, he realised the major flaw in Black’s plan, or rather the suggestion. The Zombie Trigger wasn’t just going to lay the Renegade Masters low, it was going to drop all of the seated folks in retching, hurling, vomiting messes too. Rendering any advantage null and void.

  Or so he thought. When that hideous high-pitched horror invaded the hearing of all and sundry in the room, it sent most everybody either to their knees or pitching to the floor. It drove those in the cells, crushing against the bars to begin engaging in violent behaviour mirroring that horrendous display he’d witnessed in the bar in Armada. Big, meaty guys in their death metal shirts, as well as women of similar shape, those who’d forced their way to the front to have better views, started banging their heads, not in any standard mosh, but directly against the metal bars. They hammered skulls into the immoveable impediments with a terrible force, cracking bone, showering blood, none of these ceasing the hyper violent activity.

  But the Zombie Trigger didn’t halt the Subversion trio. Initially taken off guard, as equally unsuspecting of the sudden mid-song shift into the signal they’d been vigilantly awaiting, they recovered quick, and shucked off any semblance of nausea which they might be feeling.

  Seth was hoping to do likewise, but the strange reverberating acoustics in here somehow made the Trigger seem infinitely worse, induced more paroxysms of nausea, and unlike all the other times he’d heard it pitched out of those instruments, by whatever bizarre methods, this time he couldn’t stop himself from vomiting. He slipped off his chair as he did and clipped his chin on the back of the chair in front. Pain immediately rocketed through him, but the sudden jar of shock was a blessing in disguise. It blasted the nausea out of him, supplanting that with renewed agony in a head that had already segued through a fuckload of that this evening, but the pain he could reign in, enough to scramble across the floor, aware that he was slipping through wet puddles of sick as others succumbed.

  As grotesque as that might be, he didn’t give it a second thought, after all, he was already comprehensively splattered and caked in dry blood from a host of different sources, and even being drenched in shit would be preferable to being saturated in his own blood as those death heads in the cages tore his flesh to morsels once they were released.

  As the Zombie Trigger pulverised brains, rendered the majority of caged entities inhuman, dormant zombies in the process of morphing into hideous meat-seekers, Subversion were galvanised into immediate action.

  They shot off in different directions, Black and Tempest both springing from their front rows seats and splitting, Blizzard coming off one of the rows at the rear, the three of them a blackened blur in the clustered shadows surrounding the chairs.

  Half of those chairs were overturned now as people succumbed to the sickness engendered by the Trigger, and on inspiration, Seth seized one of the overturned pieces of simple furniture, dragging it towards him. It was nigh on impossible to wrench a leg off it, he acknowledged that as he grabbed it, but maybe it would serve as the most basic of bludgeoning weapons, anything to further prolong his lifespan and that of Scarlett too, though right now he wasn’t even sure where she was, whether she was still in her chair or if she’d spilled out of it as well, overcome with nauseous convulsions.

  As if they were synced to coincide with the feral bellow that came from the throat of SamEdi, the introduction to the litany of lyrics which would expedite the metamorphosis of death heads into undead heads, the sickly green glow of lights begin spasming too, jerking and jolting, shooting erratic patterns that would be enough to induce epileptic fits in one prone to that. This played immediate havoc with those in the centre, desperately planning to ambush the stricken Masters, find some sort of makeshift weapon or merely overcome their own horrible bouts of illness.

  It sprayed haphazard shadows over the floor, spilled a ghastly green hue in transitory places before splashing elsewhere, pinning eyes in its glare before dousing them in blackness.

  Disoriented, Seth clung to his chair, trying to get his bearings and get a fix on the position of Scarlett. Or anyone.

  He saw the tall, lithe figure of Blizzard, dashing towards a hunched Renegade Master at the rear of the room, the man obviously experiencing first time Zombie Trigger virus, his gun clasped very loosely in fingers while his other hand clutched his corpulent stomach.

  As an unhealthy spike of the green light strobed a beam around that way, it spotlighted another figure back there, bathing the visage of Kathaarian queen Jazmyn in its awful pea soup hue, and rather than being hunkered down or splayed in convulsive vomit shudders, the woman was standing upright with a pistol held up in a two-fisted grip. And she proceeded to squeeze the trigger.

  The gunshot wasn’t loud, it was more of a pop, the report of it dwarfed in the hellish brigade of noise that was the Zombie Trigger, the assortment of panicked terror sounds issuing from those in the haphazard jumble that was the seating area and the grotesque sounds emanating from the cages filling up with mutating zombie folk on either side of the room. The result was devastating.
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  The running shape of Blizzard jerked violently, mid-stride, and a splash of blood slopped from his head, the red splatter rendered an irregular colour in the green glow, and then the Subversion bassist went floorwards in an untidy tangle, his legs capsizing. His body had barely connected with the cold, hard surface before Seth’s horrified eyes acknowledged where Scarlett was. Screaming a wailing ululation that may have been the word ‘no!’ Scarlett burst through the hazy miasma of shadow and intermittent green strobing in a hyperspeed charge for Jazmyn.

  Seth’s own desperate howl to warn Scarlett against this foolhardy ambush seemed to roll out of his mouth in a slow motion drone as he watched her cover the distance to where Jazmyn stood, legs spread wide. The nose of the gun swung around, but Scarlett was already on her, driving into her with an almost maniacal fervour that smashed both women down to the floor.

  Ignoring the likelihood of more guns exploding in the bedlam, Seth hauled himself up to his feet, one hand still clutching a steel chair leg of the fallen item and galloped to the melee.

  Though it wasn’t so much a melee as a bloody outburst of violence that could not be unseen, Scarlett, astride Jazmyn, had both the woman’s wrists in her grip, and with a series of powerful desperate twists and turns caused Blizzard’s killer to relinquish her hold on the pistol. It skittered away on the floor with a scrape and a metallic thump, but Scarlett didn’t lunge after it.

  Instead, she released her limpet grasp on Jazmyn’s wrists and jammed both of her thumbs into the woman’s eye sockets, stabbing with her black nails as if they were bladed weapons. The screech that instantly ensued was no deterrent whatsoever, it spurred Scarlett on to thrust her digits violently deeper, pushing until both thumbs were half interred in Jazmyn’s optical orbs, blood welling out around them.

  Seth arrived, toting his chair, and went to skirt around the hideous scene as blood sprayed and Jazmyn’s screech spiked up into a high, thin, reedy shriek that punctured his ear drums, and Scarlett spied him there.